Nick Tavares: Celtics may not be great, but I'll be watching

I don't know if this constitutes a confession, but I've been enjoying watching the Celtics so far this season.

NICK TAVARES

I don't know if this constitutes a confession, but I've been enjoying watching the Celtics so far this season.

If nothing else, it's been a while since the Celtics have had a high-profile rookie, so watching Kelly Olynyk grab rebounds and learn when to take his shots would be reason enough to watch.

This team, as it stands today, isn't without other players worth watching. Avery Bradley and Jeff Green are legitimate, and Brandon Bass and Gerald Wallace show flashes from time to time that can help the average fan envision how they might fit on a better team.

But really, this season is about Brad Stevens and Danny Ainge re-starting the clock and building the blocks of another contender, and it's much more enjoyable than watching them blow it up and march to the lottery one 25-point loss at a time.

And within this team, there's already history that shows that there's a better way to rebuild than flushing a year.

I have oddly happy memories of the 1996-97 Celtics, who won only 15 games in M.L. Carr's second year as head coach en route to trying to grab Tim Duncan in the next summer's draft. They actually had a lot of likable players — Dee Brown, Dana Barros, Rick Fox, etc. — and seemed to at least play hard.

But they didn't have a real coach and they were in over their heads just about every night. They were built to lose.

After that season, Rick Pitino came on board, and when they didn't get the first pick, Pitino tossed his hands up and threw spaghetti noodles at the wall for three and a half seasons. It wasn't a great strategy.

The next time a season this bad came around was 2006-07, during which a Paul Pierce injury triggered an 18-game losing streak and helped them finish with a 24-58 record, the second-worst in the league that year.

This time, when they didn't get the first pick in the draft, there was a backup plan, and one much more stable than Carr's "lose and hope for a miracle." That season, they had played a group of young, hungry players and helped display their potential. Kendrick Perkins, Delonte West, Al Jefferson, Rajon Rondo, Tony Allen and Ryan Gomes were all young and showed signs of being real players in the league.

They took that draft pick (Jeff Green), and shipped him, West, Wally Szczerbiak and another draft pick to Seattle for Ray Allen and Glen Davis. They then famously shipped Jefferson, Gomes, Gerald Green, Theo Ratliff and Sebastian Telfair to Minnesota for Kevin Garnett, and a powerhouse was born.

Losing is losing, ultimately. Still, losing is much easier to bear when there's at least some semblance of a plan behind it. Here, Stevens is implementing his philosophy, getting playing time for his younger players and having veterans like Wallace push them as necessary. Behind the scenes, Ainge weighs his options and will cash in when he thinks he can max out the value of his team.

And this is all taking place before Rondo sets foot on the court. Still recovering from surgery to repair a torn ACL, Rondo is expected back no sooner than December, but his presence will go a long way towards helping the young players gel and will give the brass a better sense of what they have in this group.

From there, the Celtics will find themselves in a similar situation they did in 2007, loaded with trade options and the ability to build around one of the better players in the league, and hopefully without being putrid in the process.

They could wind up being good at lot sooner that the average pundit expects. But even if it takes a few years, in the interim, they're a fun group to watch.

Nick Tavares' column appears Sundays in The Standard-Times and at SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at nick@nicktavares.com